Page:Micheaux - The Conquest, The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913).djvu/208

 requested that if he could not give them the road, to give them a depot, if they moved to the line of the survey. By that time it was a town with two solid blocks of business houses and many good merchants and bankers. I often wondered how such men could be so pinheaded, sitting back, declaring the great C. & R. W. railway could not afford to miss a little burg like Amro, but from previous observations and experience I felt sure they would wait until the last dog was dead, before trying to see what they could do. And they did.

In the meantime the promoters, who were nearly all from Megory or somewhere in Megory county, had learned that Ernest Nicholson was nobody's fool. They hooted the Nicholsons, along with the rest of the town, declaring Ernest to be anything but what he really was, until they had roused enough excitement to make Amro seem like a "good thing." Then they quietly sold their interest to the Amoureaux Brothers, who raked up about all that was left of the fortune of a few years previous, and paid six thousand, six hundred dollars for the interest of the promoters which made the Amoureaux the sole owners of the townsite and placed them in obvious control of the town's affairs, and again in the white society they liked so well.

All the Calias lumber yards owned branch yards at Amro and everybody continued to do a flourishing business. The Amroites paid little attention to the platting of the townsite to the north, nor made a single effort to ascertain which survey the railroad would follow, but continued to boast that Amro would get the road. About this time Ernest